UPDATE: As predicted, they did not revert. They are going forward with their plan. Two nice “concessions” – a blog post explaining it (I didn’t expect that) and a reverse on older URLs already in use prior to today (good move – don’t change what we’ve already tweeted).

* * *

I hope I’m wrong, but…

Patience. It’s a virtue. It’s also one that is hard to channel when issues concern social media. The “real-time web” is not real when it comes to decisions and changes (or lack of changes) on large websites, especially when something goes wrong on social news websites. Such is the situation with Digg and their recent Diggbar fiasco.

Kevin Rose, founder and CTO at Digg, was apparently not happy with the rollout of the recent change to the Digg URL shortener. It received quite a bit of negative buzz once the story broke, but the fervor of complaints have dwindled to whispers. Rose was just returning from a 2 week trip when the changes were made to push clicks from Twitter and other sources to the Digg story page rather than a framed source as other URL shorteners do.

The tweet you see above was a reference to “catching up” from this trip with the negative buzz as one of the top points of discussion. While many (including me) are hoping that the new code will be pulled, a lack of response at this stage is not a good sign. Here are the possibilities: [Read more…]

UPDATE: Leo Laporte had Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about this. You can see it on Twit Live – the Diggbar discussion starts at the 11:26 mark. Here is an excerpt:

(Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)

Laporte: Is that true?

Rose: That’s a good question.

Laporte: You don’t know?

Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.

Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…

Rose: Correct.

UPDATE: Digg has confirmed via email that this is not a mistake and the shortener is working as intended.

UPDATE: Let Digg know how you feel through Twitter. Send an @digg via @socialnews reply and your tweets will be posted here as well.

Either there’s an error happening with Diggbar or Digg just made a big mistake. Before, those who clicked on the links when not logged into Digg would be taken to the source image, article, or video.

Recently, the links have been switched to point to a Digg landing page if you aren’t logged in – the pages where the story is posted on Digg, not the original source.

No word from Digg regarding this. No blog post. No onsite message. No reply to a recent email. They dropped it in and now it appears that they’re seeing if it sticks.

I’m still holding onto hope that it’s a mistake and not a conscious choice. [Read more…]